Admittedly, some might claim Battlestar Galactica was a TV show, not a movie but I'm fairly sure I remember its first two episodes being stitched together and released in cinemas for the benefit of those who didn't know better.

From what I can recall, the Planet of the Apes adaptations were solid and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad was workmanlike, while the George Perez drawn Logan's Run was better than the movie.
The Battlestar Galactica adaptation lodged so strongly in my mind that, even having looked at several pages of it, on the internet, in the last twenty four hours, not one panel of those pages rings a single bell for me. Despite me having fond feelings for it, I take this as a worrying sign that it might not have been the most memorable thing ever published.

Yesterday, I discovered that Marvel at one point descended into total madness and did an adaptation of Robert Stigwood's Sgt Pepper movie.

I've previously argued that it was potentially unwise to do an adaptation of Close Encounters, what with it having a piece of music as its key moment. Bearing in mind that Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is a musical and basically has nothing at all going for it apart from music, how on Earth could it possibly have been made to work as a comic, when comics can't do music?

Clearly, it couldn't because it would appear that the whole project proved to be so disastrous that Marvel refused to even release the thing in America, thus robbing the English-speaking world of what is no doubt an act of magnificent madness. Seemingly, if you want to read it, you can only do so if you can read French or German.

Anyway, those are my heartwarming memories and thoughts on the matter. Which comic book adaptations of movies have you read? And which have been your favourites and not-so-favourites?

7 comments:

Dell and Gold Key/Western both did a lot of TV and movie tie-ins in the sixties, usually with photo covers, sometimes with movie poster art or painted covers.

I had The Valley of Gwangi, based on the Ray Harryhausen "cowboys vs. dinosaurs" movie. It may have been the last issue of Dell's Movie Classics series.

Western did a lot of Disney adaptations, both the cartoons (like Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty, Lady & the Tramp) and live action movies (e.g., Swiss Family Robinson, In Search of the Castaways). I had Blackbeard's Ghost, The Gnome-Mobile, and The Boatniks.

Sometime around 1968-69, I had Gold Key's King Kong, based on the 1933 movie. At about that same time, they also published adaptations of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Yellow Submarine. The latter two movies were musicals, so Marvel wasn't alone in the "what were they thinking!?" category.

I also had Charlton's Fantastic Giants ca. 1970. AFAIR, it was a one-shot. It reprinted their adaptations of Gorgo and Konga.

The only Marvel movie comics I had were For Your Eyes Only and a couple of issues of Star Wars.

And, yes, the first two Battlestar Galactica episodes were cobbled together into a movie and released in theaters. The same thing was done with the Buck Rogers made-for-TV movie/TV series pilot episode.

There were actually 2 movies. Battlestar Galactica, which was cut from 1st 3 episodes of the series. And Mission Galactica which was the 2 part "Living Legend" episodes with the following episode "Fire in Space". Living legend featured the return of the Battlestar Peagasus captained by Lloyd Bridges.

Both released on DVD and worth the few pounds they can normally be found for.

I had 2 issues of the digest version on Battlestar as a kid (published by Marvel UK in B&W around 1980/1). But only got the full series many years later.

I enjoyed the Marvel UK Star Wars weekly as a kid having every issue.

I never really went for TV and Movie adaptations. Probably the only exception was the 11 issue DC Babylon 5 series in the early 90s which featured story elements before they appeared in the TV series

The only movie adaptations I've read are the five apes movies (all in the POTA weekly but "Battle" was so boring that I finally stopped reading the comic), Golden Voyage of Sinbad (also in POTA) and Star Wars which I owned as two Treasury Editions. I've never read the George Perez Logan's Run but I'm fascinated that it's "better than the movie" because, in my opinion, the movie is actually pretty good.

Aggy, Sorry it took so long for your comment to appear. For some reason, Blogger diverted it to the spam folder, from where I had to rescue it.

Colin, I think the appeal of Marvel's Logan's Run adaptation for me lay in the way it was drawn by George Perez. He managed to make it feel like a proper comic story, rather than just being a slavish adaptation of a film.

Colin, if you're interested -www.diversionsofthegroovykind.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/science-fiction-theater-logans-run.htmlEven with just lines on a page instead of Jenny Agutter, its still an improvement on the film.

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I inflicted the novels "Danny Yates Must Die" and "Mr Landen Has No Brain" on the world, as well as a bunch of short stories under a bunch of pseudonyms.
I also run the blogs "Steve Does Comics" and "Steve Does Dr Who".
My latest novel - "Fatal Inheritance" - is out now on Amazon Kindle. If you like women fighting the forces of evil, it's the book for you.